It’s quite a shock, verging on a distraction, to realise that the player king is Charlton Heston, and his queen, Hecuba, Judi Dench. One of the most interesting and arresting things about the casting is that Branagh uses big movie stars to fill the minor roles. He overlays that with actors who work with him in his company: Richard Briers as Polonius, Michael Maloney as Laertes, Nicholas Farrell as Horatio and a weirdly restrained Brian Blessed as the ghost. He uses his own favourite English actors in the major roles, resulting in some masterful performances: Derek Jacobi as Claudius, Julie Christie as Gertrude and Kate Winslet as Ophelia.
The choice of actors for the other characters is interesting. In paying attention to both those aspects of the prince Branagh is presenting the character as Shakespeare intended Hamlet to be. At the same time, he is able to draw the audience into the prince’s inner thoughts convincingly. He has a talent for playing quirky characters and he uses it here in abundance, sometimes going over the top. He goads Polonius mercilessly, he buffets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern back and forth with banter until they don’t know where they are and he crucifies Osrick with a cruel tongue.īranagh plays the role in that way – an intelligent man who uses humour to relate to the ordinary world around him and the ordinary people in it. He winds some of the characters around his fingers and toys with them. An examination of the text, though, shows another side to him – a funny, game-playing tease. Hamlet is generally thought of in the public mind, as a dour, melancholy young man on the verge of suicide. It’s difficult to see why Hamlet was not more successful as, in many ways, it worked well.īranagh’s own performance, as the prince is brilliant.
Branagh went on to make some great films, like Shackleton and Warm Springs, both great films, but Hamlet is not spoken of in critical circles as a great film. In Branagh’s film, we have a sumptuous environment of wealth and luxury. It also affects the atmosphere Shakespeare intended, which was a minimal physical backdrop of battlements, castle walls and huge bare stone halls. However, advancing the period by several hundred years confuses the political background to the play – for example, the tribute that England paid to Denmark in the medieval period doesn’t make sense in the Napoleonic setting. It makes sense cinematically because every scene is filled with the luxury of a late eighteenth-century royal court. That changed the austerity that Shakespeare intended to the more opulent Empire style of Napoleonic Europe. Shakespeare set the play in the medieval period, and he had his reasons for that, but Branagh chose to set it in Napoleonic times. He went on to direct Much Ado About Nothing in 1993, again to wide critical acclaim. It has since become recognised by many critics to be the best film version of any Shakespeare play ever. Long before he started his career in film-making Branagh advocated full-length productions of Shakespeare’s plays on film, and when he had the chance to put his money where his mouth was, he directed a full-length Henry V in 1989. He complained that Shakespeare “has left in superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty revision should have noticed.” It’s possible that Shakespeare didn’t intend it to be that long and that subsequent editing included things that Shakespeare would have excluded for his own production. Even a four-hour stage performance of the play is risky for a director. Moreover, although it is four hours long – much longer than any film has a reasonable right to be – Branagh managed to make it riveting. Whatever else one may say about Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 film adaptation of Hamlet, it is a visual joy. Each Shakespeare’s play name links to a range of resources about each play: Character summaries, plot outlines, example essays and famous quotes, soliloquies and monologues: All’s Well That Ends Well Antony and Cleopatra As You Like It The Comedy of Errors Coriolanus Cymbeline Hamlet Henry IV Part 1 Henry IV Part 2 Henry VIII Henry VI Part 1 Henry VI Part 2 Henry VI Part 3 Henry V Julius Caesar King John King Lear Loves Labour’s Lost Macbeth Measure for Measure The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of Windsor A Midsummer Night’s Dream Much Ado About Nothing Othello Pericles Richard II Richard III Romeo & Juliet The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus Troilus & Cressida Twelfth Night The Two Gentlemen of Verona The Winter’s Tale This list of Shakespeare plays brings together all 38 plays in alphabetical order. Plays It is believed that Shakespeare wrote 38 plays in total between 15.
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